The Orchid Shroud (37 page)

Laurent noted this down.

The adjudant pursued: “Did you happen to mention your plans to see Monsieur Pujol today to anyone, or were you aware of anyone following you en route to Aurillac?”

She felt herself floating above the hospital bed, out the window, back to the grassy clearing. Once again she heard the gardener’s labored breathing, saw the blood spilling out of his mouth. And then it came back to her.

“Didier.” She gestured feebly with her free hand. “Told me. Ba—ba—” Mara’s tongue felt like an alien thing over which she had little control.

“Baba?” Compagnon had to lean in again to catch her words.

“Baby. Another baby.”

Compagnon snapped up like a jack-in-the-box. “Are you saying there’s another dead baby in the wall?”

Laurent jumped, too. “Maybe it was twins, sir.”

She was hovering high in the air now, blowing like a leaf over
a dark forest. But she managed to mumble before she lost consciousness, “Cut its head off. Ask Didier. Knows where Christophe is. Probably in contact with him all the time.”

“Christophe de Bonfond.” The adjudant eyed Mara speculatively as she slipped from him into a drugged sleep. “Even if this werewolf-lycanthrope business is all nonsense, which I think it is, if he’s our assailant, we’ll get him.” He lumbered to his feet. “Stay with her, Naudet. Batailler’s with Pujol. She and the gardener are off limits to everyone except medical personnel. Get identification and contact information from all visitors, and detain anyone fitting de Bonfond’s description. As soon as she’s awake, get as much out of her as you can. I’m going to have another word with de Bonfond’s housekeeper.”

“What about the second baby, sir?” Laurent called after his superior as the man strode away.

“
Putain!
All I need is another kid. Headless at that!”

S
ergeant Naudet. I’ve just heard about Didier Pujol and Madame Dunn.”

Laurent, recognizing the tall bearded man who came hurrying up to him in the hospital corridor, stood up. The two men shook hands.

“Do you have some identification, monsieur?”

“Identification?” Julian stared, unbelieving. “What’s going on? You know me. I was there when they found the baby, when you and your uncle Loulou La Pouge turned up.”

“So was Christophe de Bonfond,” Laurent said woodenly. “I need to see some ID, please.”

“All right, for pity’s sake.” Julian dug out his wallet. “Is she all right? Is it serious? Who the hell would want to shoot her?” He craned around Laurent to glimpse the motionless form on the bed, his voice strident with worry.

Laurent, scanning Julian’s driver’s license, relented. “It’s just a
flesh wound, monsieur, and it may be that Pujol was the intended victim.”

“Didier? But why? I heard there were hunters about. Weren’t they shot by accident?”

Laurent shook his head. “Madame Dunn and Monsieur Pujol were shot with a rifle. The hunters carried shotguns.” Realizing that he had probably already divulged too much, the gendarme turned official. “I’m sorry, monsieur, I can’t say anything more. Even what I’ve told you is confidential, strictly speaking.”

“Incroyable!”
Julian exclaimed, throwing up his arms. “All right. Keep your mouth buttoned, if you must. However, as one of France’s Bravest and Best, perhaps you’re not above receiving information? You might even find what I have to say of interest.”

WEDNESDAY, 19 MAY

T
he hospital room was crowded. Julian sat at a little table wedged into a corner. Mara, cranked up to a sitting position, her right arm in a sling, worked on a portable bed desk. Both surfaces were covered with papers. Cartons filled with documents stood on the floor between them. One long uniformed leg, belonging to Laurent Naudet, on duty in the corridor, was just visible through the open doorway.

Guy Verdier had been furious when Compagnon had turned up to subpoena his family archives. Julian had not only convinced both the adjudant and Mara’s twitchy
juge d’instruction
that the motive for Jean-Claude’s death might lie in those archives, he had persuaded both men (after an official perusal of the material had turned up nothing) that he and Mara were the best people to pick out the critical material. Unable to deny them access, Guy sought to obstruct: although several gendarmes had already pawed through the material, he had insisted that Mara and Julian wear gloves while handling the documents. They were fragile. He said that Jean-Claude had worn white cotton gloves.

“Quelle merde,”
Mara had snorted. The genealogist had not worn any kind of protective gear when he had flipped through Cécile’s diary.

Mara found Cécile’s letters to Eloïse right away. There were sixteen of them, bundled together in a packet tied with a faded red ribbon. They covered the period between Eloïse’s departure from Aurillac in the fall of 1870 and June 1879 (fortunately, the writer
was better about dating her correspondence than her diary) and confirmed Cécile’s talent for plain writing:

A moment later, Mara called out excitedly, “Julian, come here. This is it. It’s the proof you’re looking for.” He leaned in to read with her:

“Brilliant,” said Julian, hungrily scanning the letter, as if Cécile’s ungainly scrawl would tell him more. It didn’t, and he realized with a sense of disappointment that it only confirmed what he already knew. However, the letter did raise an important point. Eloïse had made the shawl for Cécile in 1869. Was the orchid her idea or Cécile’s? He revisited the question he had asked coming away from the Wolf Cave: why choose that particular flower? If it had the werewolf associations that Mara suspected, and since the shawl had been specifically intended for Cécile, did it point to a lycanthropic side to Hugo’s sister that they had not suspected? She
was, after all, a de Bonfond. Or was Eloïse making a nasty statement about the de Bonfonds in general? But no, she had done the needlework while she still had hopes of marrying Hugo. She would not have wanted to impugn the reputation of her future husband’s family. He shook his head. The soundest conclusion seemed to be that
Cypripedium incognitum
was simply an unusual flower that had attracted the embroiderer’s eye.

He pulled his chair over to read the rest of the letters with Mara. The next one, dated 5 December 1871, informed Eloïse of the death by choking of Dominique. It was written with Cécile’s hallmark candor but provided no more insight into the death of little Yvette Garneau than had her diary entry on the subject. Another announced the birth of Henriette and Hugo’s son on 4 January 1872. The baby was named Dieudonné-Dominique-Christophe de Bonfond.

Then, on 7 February 1872, Cécile penned:

“Blimey,” said Julian. “Maybe Loulou was right. Maybe Cécile did for him. To get back for all the years of abuse.”

“Or Eloïse,” said Mara. “Hell hath no fury, and so on. She knew about horses, too.”

“Hugo died”—Mara referred to a page of notes she had made on key de Bonfond dates—“on the twenty-third of February. It took him seventeen days to do it.”

The last few letters were thinly spaced out over the next seven years. Or perhaps they were the only ones that had survived. Cécile never entered the Abbaye des Eaux but remained at Aurillac, growing, as Jean-Claude had said, old, ill, and mad. A letter dated June 1879 informed her cousin that she had been

The final letter bore the date November 1879 and was written in an almost undecipherable hand:

Mara leaned back against the bed, shaken by this final
cri du coeur
.

“Bloody hell,” said Julian, thinking of the toxic brew that must have been created by those three women, Odile, Henriette, and Cécile, living and hating under the same roof. It was no wonder Cécile went insane.

Wearily, Mara bundled the letters together and tied them up. Her right arm ached. It was ten past two. Fifty minutes before the nurse would come with her next painkiller. Julian returned to his corner. Ten minutes later, he said, “Ha!” and began ferreting about in a box. He pulled out, one after another, yellowed slips of paper which he laid out on the table.

“Hello?” she called after watching him for a time.

“Right!” Triumphantly he turned to her, holding up a clutch of the slips, like a handful of trump cards. “These are bills of sale, Mara, dating from 1815 through to 1833. Between those dates the Verdiers made outlays of cash for the construction of several cast-iron frames fitted out with leaded glass. Here’s a bill for a lean-to, and another for a bigger, free-standing structure. There are bills for the purchase of stoves and replacement glass “to be affixed with glazing putty.” They ordered cork, sphagnum, and peat, as well as charcoal and woven baskets on a regular basis. And in 1827, someone invested in the installation of a piped hot-water heating system. All told, they spent a tidy sum, in
anciens francs
of course. Now, what does all this suggest?”

He gave her time to work it out. When she did not, he said, “Hothouses, Mara. Someone in the Verdier family took a keen interest in them. And people grew orchids in hothouses.”

“Oh, I
see …
But wait a minute. They also grew other things. Oranges, for example. Big French estates often had an
orangerie
.”

“Ah, but here’s the clincher.” He waved a bill at her. “This one’s dated 1830 and is for three large, made-to-order
boîtes en verre.”

“What’s so special about that?”

“These, I suspect, were no ordinary glass boxes. If my hunch is right, they were probably the Dordogne equivalent of a Wardian case, a sealed glass container developed by a chap named Nathaniel Ward for transporting live plant material. You see, orchid mania in the nineteenth century was a hobby only the rich could afford. You had to have a hothouse for your plants. And you had to have the plants themselves. That was the harder part. You couldn’t just go out and buy your orchids from a nursery or order them by air express. You generally had to send someone out to the far ends of the earth to get them, because the orchids people wanted were tropical exotics, and they wanted ones no one else had yet brought back. Rich fanciers spent fortunes sending collectors around the world in search of new species. The collecting methods were generally disastrous, ecologically speaking, and the transportation conditions even worse. That’s where the Wardian case came in. Until the Wardian case was developed, most plants never made it back to Europe alive. Nor did a lot of the collectors, for that matter.”